


i'll meet you down at the sea

by skai_heda



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Immortality, follows storyline up to the end of s6, vague reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-18
Updated: 2019-11-18
Packaged: 2021-01-31 00:01:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21436843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skai_heda/pseuds/skai_heda
Summary: an accident freezes bellamy in time, making him eighteen forever, at least until he meets his soulmate.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake & Raven Reyes, Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin
Comments: 7
Kudos: 158





	i'll meet you down at the sea

Bellamy Blake is eighteen years old when he Freezes.

He'd hoped he wouldn't ever Freeze. Maybe it's because he's afraid of how it happens. And then he finds his car wrapped around a telephone pole at four in the morning after his eighteenth birthday, and he still wakes up a couple hours later.

He remembers the names of the doctors, but vaguely, a memory he's barely holding onto. Dr. Kane.

"Bellamy," Dr. Kane had whispered. "Bellamy. You're okay."

"Where am I?" he asked. It was a stupid question. He was obviously in a hospital. But then again, he was also supposed to be dead.

"You Froze," Kane murmured. 

He remembers the sensation of feeling cold all over. "What?" he asked.

"Don't be sad, Bellamy," Kane had urged in a tone that suggested the opposite. "Think of it as a gift."

* * *

She looks so old when he goes to see her in the hospital.

Recognition flickers in Gina Maxwell's eyes when she glances at him. The look laid upon an old love. 

"Gina," Bellamy whispers. "Hi."

"This isn't fair," she says softly. "You get to be stuck in the year you were at your physical year. And I'm..."

She laughs softly. "Dying."

He steps forward and takes her hand. It's not too wrinkled, and when he looks into her eyes he can see traces of the beauty he was so entranced with all those decades ago.

_Gina will always be beautiful._

_Beautiful souls always are._

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. "I wish I could've made it this far with you."

Gina coughs, then shakes her head. "I know, Bellamy. But you'll go farther than any of us ever will."

* * *

The thing is, Bellamy Blake gets astronomically lucky.

There are just a few Ices scattered around the world, and he happens to run into just enough to make up for the strangeness of his life, his age, what he wants to do and who he wants to be. When Bellamy Blake is nearing sixty years old, he finds himself rocketing into space. And, despite the coldness of it, he loves it in space. He falls in love with the stars that envelop him, for they will be the only things that outlast him.

* * *

Raven Reyes is exceedingly special. She's smart, dedicated, hot, and funny. She's perfect. There are hours and hours of talk between them as Bellamy floats from hallway to hallway with her, checking monitors, experiments. She also seems pretty young, but then again, so does he.

He doesn't quite realize quite how special she is until there's a problem with the airlock in their section of the ship, and while they manage to stay inside, neither of them are wearing their suits, and he's pretty sure he sees Raven's head collide with about every sharp thing in the corridor.

_She's going to die, _he thinks. _And I won't._

And he hates the thought, because it's not like Bellamy ever did anything to deserve living while the best people died.

_Raven, _he thinks. _Raven._

* * *

"Bellamy. Wake up."

He sees the blood caked on the side of her face, matted in her dark hair. He sees that she is _here, _and leaning over him, smelling like smoke.

"Raven," he chokes out. "How?" _How are you alive?_

"Same reason as you," she whispers, patting down his curls with the hand that isn't blackened with soot. "I'm Frozen."

He thinks he's going to throw up. And he does, after a few frantic motions for Raven to move out of his way.

But he really doesn't. He just retches for a good five minutes before realizing that nothing is going to happen.

"Blake, you gotta calm down," she says, but her voice is sad. "You've got to breathe."

* * *

When NASA finally gains the ability to come up with a good enough reason for their survival and brings the whole crew back down to earth, Bellamy can't say that he isn't relieved. He'll miss the stars, but he just wants to feel the ground beneath his feet again.

Raven hovers at his side like a shadow, always waiting, but never pushing. And Bellamy knows that when he's finally ready to talk, when he's finally ready to confront reality, she'll be there.

* * *

"How long have you been alive?" Raven asks.

After a moment of careful deliberation, Bellamy answers truthfully, "I don't know."

She raises her eyebrows at him, taking a swig of the bottle they share.

He sighs and shrugs. "Sixty years. About."

Raven smirks. "A hundred and three."

Bellamy shakes his head and snatches the bottle out of her hands. "That's a _lie."_

"It's true!" she implores, grinning brighter than the sun. 

"You seem way too happy to be that old," Bellamy groans, shoving the bottle away from both of them.

"Listen, Blake," Raven says with a smile. "It's not that bad. Not if you at least try to enjoy it."

* * *

They say that when you meet the human being most perfectly suited to you physically, able to produce the best and the strongest offspring, you will have met your soulmate. Bellamy doesn't necessarily believe in any of it, and it really only gets more bizarre. It is said that when you kiss your soulmate with love for the first time, you'll Unfreeze, and then you will age with them. He supposes it is a beautiful concept, but too good to be true. He wonders how long he'll wander the world before he finds his soulmate.

_True love's kiss._

The thing is, Bellamy knows he could never deserve anything like that.

* * *

Ten years after the NASA incident, he loses all contact with Raven Reyes. He's not exactly sure how or why it happens, but one day he isn't aware of it and the next day he is. And that's when the questions come in, whether she's dead or not, if she had somehow met her soulmate in the decade since he realized who she was. It makes him oddly and terribly sad to consider it, the idea of Raven leaning forward to kiss some unknown person's lips, and her finding a grey hair among her black waves some time since then.

He realizes how much he wants that, how much he wants to grow older and just die. He wants to meet a guy or a girl and he wants to kiss them and he wants just a few of his black curls to turn white and just a few lines to etch themselves into his skin. 

He wants to be alive, not to live forever.

* * *

It's a little harder when the Ark comes into play.

_The world is going to end._

"They're going to be watching you very closely, Bellamy," the man in front of him says. Bellamy finds himself staring blankly out the window, at the tiny white pinpricks that he had once loved so violently and so wholly. 

"I know."

"I remember when you Froze," the man says, and Bellamy's head snaps up. Everyone from his life before the accident is dead, long dead. It's been almost a hundred years. It's impossible.

And then, like a camera focusing on something, the man's face becomes clearer, both in front of Bellamy and inside his head, and a name bubbles its way to the tip of his tongue before spilling out in a ragged breath.

_"Dr. Kane."_

Kane nods a little. His hair has streaks of grey in it, and he catches Bellamy looking at it with astonishment.

"Oh, this?" Kane says, gesturing vaguely at his head. "I met my soulmate."

Bellamy swallows. "When?"

"Forty years ago."

Bellamy frowns, and is alarmed by the sudden sadness in Kane's eyes.

"She's dead now," Kane explains. Bellamy doesn't feel like asking any more questions. "Now, under so much scrutiny, you're going to have to lay low on this space station."

Bellamy nods vaguely, suddenly becoming fixated on how hard it is to swallow.

"But I'm going to take care of your profile in the system," Kane continues, watching him carefully. "I'll alter bio-scanner reports to look like you're aging normally."

"And what about when it's supposedly time for me to die?"

Kane nods sagely. "I'll take care of that."

* * *

"Bellamy?"

He whips around, and turns to face a girl with dark hair and a face as white as snow. She looks vaguely familiar, but Bellamy can't understand why.

He also can't understand why this girl would know him.

"Bellamy," she repeats, sounding relieved. The corridor is empty except for them. "It's you."

"Who are you?" he ventures, taking a step back. The girl holds out her arm to display a small, brown birthmark on the inside of her arm, and all the air rushes out of his lungs. His little sister Octavia had that birthmark. His little sister, pale and dark-haired, and dead at the age of six.

He's going to be sick.

She's dead. She's dead, and he's probably hallucinating due to lack of oxygen or being alive way too long.

"I know, I know," the girl who looks like Octavia says hurriedly, stepping forward, causing Bellamy to almost topple backward. "They said I died in the hospital, right?"

He runs a hand through his hair. "You... you Froze. You're an Ice."

The girl grins and nods.

"No," he says shakily. "Why would they lie to my family? Why wouldn't they bring you back?"

"I Froze too young," Octavia said. "They took me to some facility when I was six."

"But you... you look older now!" Bellamy splutters. "You look like you're..."

"Sixteen," Octavia fills in. "They did something to make me age normally, and I did, for ten years. Then there was an accident in the lab and I... I Froze again."

Bellamy shakes his head, still feeling that same nausea he felt when he found about Raven. He remembers her singing _Ice, Ice, Baby _at the top of her lungs and he presses his hands into his eyes.

"Bellamy, please," Octavia whispers. "It's me. I promise."

"No," he repeats dumbly. "It's not possible."

Octavia sighs softly and is silent for a long time.

"Augustus had a sister," she finally says.

* * *

It takes 95 years to break them apart, and 2 more to knit them back together. 97 years since Bellamy found his sister, his feet touch the ground again.

* * *

And then he meets _her._

* * *

Finn Collins is an Ice. He should've realized when he saw Spacewalker slam his head into the side of the dropship when they had first landed, but he doesn't realize it until much later, when he comes back from the village with Murphy.

"Knives didn't even hurt him, man," Murphy murmured near Bellamy. "Every time I saw him fall, he'd get up again. And again. I swear I saw at least three people stab him in the chest, and he'd be out cold for a bit, and he'd just wake up."

* * *

There's blood all over Clarke's hands.

"Why isn't he waking up?" Raven asked, clinging to Bellamy. _"Why isn't he fucking waking up?"_

He had envied Raven so much, to have found a soulmate who was an Ice. To have found her forever.

Now, he's not so sure.

_"I don't know," _Clarke says, shaking like a leaf. He longs to reach out and touch her. "I don't—"

"You kissed him," Raven breathes.

Clarke's face goes sheet-white as she realizes what she's done.

_She loved him._

Some strange, unfamiliar feeling starts to simmer in the pit of his stomach, and he finds himself unable to look Clarke in the eye.

Beside him, Raven starts to scream.

* * *

By this point in time, Bellamy's done thousands of things he isn't proud of. He shot a Chancellor, killed god knows how many people, and he's fallen in love with the girl who wore death like a crown.

Not that he knew it, but it was true.

Gina Martin is a familiar face, really, really familiar face, reminding him someone who had been important to him, a very long time ago. And of course, he loves her, because she is so, so _real. _And then he leans forward to kiss her, thinking absolutely nothing of it until he discovers a singular grey hair on his pillow the next morning when he wakes up.

* * *

Bellamy Blake wants to be dead.

"I'm sorry," some faceless person says. "Gina was... Gina was killed. At Mount Weather."

Raven Reyes catches him when he falls backward. Raven Reyes, who had wormed her way back into his life.

"Bellamy," she says. "Bellamy, breathe."

But he can't. He later realizes that he was Freezing right then and there, all over again.

"Bellamy," she says again. "Bellamy, let's _go."_

* * *

Despite all the callouses, her hand is soft in between his own. Clarke's tears drip onto his freckled skin, but he's paralyzed.

_Clarke, Clarke, Clarke—_

"—we—"

That's all he hears, and that's all it takes for his anger to return, for his rage to explode within him like some beast born of the fiery pain caused by Gina's death.

Bellamy tries to block out the sound of Clarke screaming as he leaves her.

* * *

The woman who sits tied to the bed is not his Raven, not the Raven who dragged him out of a broken space station, the woman who watched all the Star Wars movies with him, the woman who held onto him for decades. It is not Raven, this woman who taunts him and pulls out all his intentions for everyone to see and twists them into something ugly. 

It is also not his Clarke who launches herself at ALIE-Raven, her whole body contracted with pain from the inside. Bellamy has to pick her up and hold her against his body as he carries her out of the room, listening to her scream her head off. 

She's regained some sense of control by the time Bellamy gets around to treating her injuries. She watches with quiet astonishment, her lips slightly parted. In that moment, she seems as young as she really is, eighteen and still growing, still aging despite the uncertainty of tomorrow.

"What happened with Lexa?" he asks. He knows they are not there yet, knows that he's in no position to talk to her about this, but Clarke tells him anyway.

"Same thing that happened with Finn," she sniffles.

Bellamy's blood runs cold. "You and Lexa..."

"And then she was shot," Clarke chokes out, and waits a second before pulling her arm out of Bellamy's grasp. 

"Clarke—" he starts.

But she's already gone.

* * *

"I don't want to feel that way anymore," he admits to her, loving the way her entire face is illuminated by the moonlight. When she leans forward to wrap her arms around his body, he surrenders himself to the feeling of her, burying his face in her soft waves of hair. He has his arms around her waist, and his traitorous mind keeps thinking about how easy it would be to just pull back and crash his lips into hers, to allow himself to be swept away by the storm she has created in his heart.

* * *

Sitting in the commander's chair, Clarke seems smaller than she really is. His fingers brush her lips when he puts ALIE's chip in her mouth, and a shiver runs through them both.

His ears are still ringing with the sound of her screaming as Abby put the Flame in her.

_Come back, _he tries to say, just with the sharp, intense gaze he gives her. _Come back to me._

The steel in her blue eyes responds, _I will._

* * *

It's the sound of her crying that wakes him up, and his heart shatters at the sight of her sitting at the desk, looking helpless. He realizes that these are the small moments that Clarke needs so much, the small moments where she lets herself cry before she presents herself to the world again.

He's drawn to her, his hand landing on her shoulder and squeezing. Quiet words are exchanged, and when she puts her head against his hand he wants to bend down and hug her, envelop her in warmth. 

"If I'm on that list, you're on that list," he says.

_You and I, we're staying together._

_I promise._

* * *

When she holds her gun up and aims at him, he's afraid to die for the very first time.

_How? You haven't even kissed her._

But he can't help but feel that it was something far bigger than a kiss, because he is already irrevocably and unquestionably in love with her.

Clarke doesn't shoot him. She can't.

* * *

Her hair is so soft between his fingers. Bellamy's gut twists at the sight of her pale face, the artificial nightblood's fault, supposedly.

_We're going to be okay, soon, _he thinks as he holds her. _You and I are going to be okay. Up there in space. We'll be okay._

* * *

It takes years for him to come to terms with it, years for him to stop tearing himself into pieces over it.

That feeling never does go away, though, that horrible, awful emptiness that eats away at him.

Every time he kisses Echo, he thinks, he hopes that he'll Unfreeze, but he never does.

* * *

"How?" Bellamy breathes onto her cheek as he holds her close in the Eligius cell. He asks, but he already knows the answer. He can see it in the softness of her skin, the only lines on her face from her frown.

_Frozen._

Her short hair tickles the smooth skin of his jaw, and he forgets who Echo is, forgets the outside world, and the world shrinks to the space between their lips. He begins to lean forward, but Clarke leans away.

"Bellamy," she whispers, cupping his jaw. "Bellamy, I can't."

"Why not?" he asks, turning his face to brush his lips across her fingers. "Clarke, why?"

"It'll be the end for you, Bellamy," she whispers. "I can't do that to you."

"What, you think if you kiss me, I'll die?"

"I'll be putting you in danger, Bellamy, if I let you do this," she murmurs. "Bellamy, if you love me—"

She stops talking when she sees the look on his face, as his brain is suddenly flooded with memories of Echo.

Clarke frowns again, then pulls away. "We can't."

He doesn't object.

* * *

_Dead, dead, she's dead, she's dead—_

"No!" he chokes out, his hands on her chest. "No, no, you can't—Clarke, I need you! _Wake up!"_

He damn near punches her, trying to wake her, trying to bring her back. He lowers his head to hers again and puts his lips against hers, trying to breathe life back into her lungs. _Clarke—_

She inhales against his mouth and there's just a small moment where they are fused to each other, their eyes closed and their lips crushed together into a kiss, a kiss as soon as she reflexively angles her head to slant her mouth against his own.

The need to breathe becomes too much after about a second, and she pulls away with a gasp. Bellamy reaches forward and grabs her before she can fall back onto the table, and she holds him tightly.

"Bellamy," she murmurs into his ear. "Bellamy, _Bellamy..."_

He leans back to look at her face, but his heart skips a beat when he sees a thin lock of her hair turn lighter and lighter, until it's starkly white against a sea of gold.

"Bellamy," she says again, reaching up to touch his hair. "Oh, god, Bellamy—"

He knows what's happening.

"Clarke," he murmurs, opening his mouth to say something, but then she goes limp in his arms, sinking into a dead faint.

* * *

When it's finally over, when Josephine is a thing of the past and Octavia is safe and permanently attached to Gabriel, and Echo has exhausted her knowing smirks with him and encouraged him to go for what he loves, when they finally reach peace, he goes and he finds Clarke.

She's been avoiding him all this time, as if her silence could Freeze him. 

But Bellamy thinks it's time to forget it now, and he knows it's time to give in.

"Clarke," he says, appearing in the doorway of her room in the Sanctum castle. "Can I come in?"

She looks up from her sketchbook before setting it aside and nodding. Her hair brushes her shoulders now, and Bellamy wants nothing more than to run his hands through it, find that streak of white and watch it dissolve into silken threads in his fingers.

Bellamy tentatively takes a seat at the edge of her bed next to her, keeping his eyes on the floor.

"I love you," he says softly.

"What?" Clarke asks weakly after a moment.

"I love you," Bellamy repeats. "I can't not love you. There's not a single reality in which I won't be so completely in love with you."

After a minute, Clarke's fingers find his, steady and unyielding. His friend, his love, his future and his forever.

_Clarke._

"I love you, Bellamy," she says. "Forever."

He nods weakly before turning his head to kiss her lightly on the lips, the first kiss that matters, the first time they embrace peace, the first time they embrace forever. Clarke kisses him again and again until they're both out of breath, and then she just sits there with her head on his shoulder, her eyes drifting closed.

Bellamy thinks about forever.

And now, he'll finally get it.


End file.
